We were in a small freezing room, devoid of furniture apart from a gurney that looked like a relic from a haunted asylum horror flick. Undaunted, Vic had been pummelling my bruised flesh and stretching my aching bones with such a sustained ferocity that I was seriously considering asking him to knock me out.

“You’ll feel better in the morning,” was all he would say. I lay under a thin cover stark naked and feeling like my entire body had been set alight. And not in a good way.

“My mother always told me to live in the present,” I moaned.

“You never knew your mother and I’m beginning to doubt you ever even had one. Oh, by the way, what I said to the blond geezer, what’s his name? Rudy isn’t it? Brave bloke by the way. Takes guts to even think about standing up to Mike or me. Oh yeah and talking of guts, unless you want to lose them, lock your door when you turn in tonight.”

“What about all that owe you stuff Vic, are you planning to off us in an all singing all dancing show of just how grateful you are?”

“Rose, don’t you know what tonight is?”

“Go on, amaze me.” I winced as he dug his fingers deep into the meat of my shoulders.

“Just think about it.”

I did. My spirits, low enough to do an Olympic level limbo, flatlined.

“What if it doesn’t hold,” I said eventually. “The door, I mean.”

“Don’t even think about it. Now hold still.”

“What do you know about wulvers Vic?”

The pummelling paused and then:

“Enough to know you leave them the fuck alone. Here goes.”

I felt the slow trickle of something warm across my back and didn’t bother asking him what it was. A low rumbling sound filled the room until a heavy weight fell across me muffling my hearing but it didn’t matter because I could feel it, like a cat’s purr. A warm lassitude spread through my limbs as though I had been injected with something. A persistent little voice at the back of my mind was trying to remind me about something vital but I was too tired to make the effort and instead opted for the proffered oblivion. I was at the end of whatever served as my rope and if my body didn’t heal some of the damage it had suffered over the past few days it was Goodnight Vienna, whatever the hell that turned out to mean. As long as it didn’t involve Midge Ure, I was psyched.

Edinburgh’s birth and the land upon which it was built was nothing more than a volcanic plug spewed out of the belly of a bilious god; destined to become a precarious high point where people felt safe from invasion, but unfortunately were not. They built a wall, a stone girdle as though that would protect them from what was within. And when the girdle became too tight, they built up and up giving the world its first plague ridden high rises. But that of course was so Old Town darling, and the New was supposed to be the antidote to all that nasty disease and poverty. And maybe it was, but it was also sterile, without the bloated, infarcted beauty of the old where most of the supernaturals made their home.

But there was a newer, tougher breed of supernatural that had no need of such sentimental aesthetics and I was going to its lair. As I turned left into Dean Terrace past the carefully preserved des res from another era, I tried to focus on the non-existent plan which so far amounted to rooting around in the monster’s lair while it was absent hoping to find The Mask which of course would just be lying at the end of a trial of arrows along with some clues about the identity of two murderers who may or may not have known its owner twenty very odd years ago.

Finally onto Ann Street and I would have loved to have known how a flying lizard centuries old had managed to infest one of its mansions. Number 28 was next, the lights were not on but that did not mean no one was home. I walked up the short rubbish strewn, weed filled path and rang the bell which I could hear clanging around the house.

No one came. Not one to take no answer for an answer, I pushed at the door and it opened. It wasn’t really that surprising that she didn’t think to lock the door, it wasn’t as though she needed to be security conscious and if random council workers or posties went missing more plausible explanations could be found, palms greased, influence exercised. The beauty of this type of predator was that it lay in wait amongst its prey perfectly camouflaged until it was too late.

People didn’t tend to suspect their neighbours of being vicious, vampiric killing machines. Or at least not for long…

Back at my thankfully Rufus-free flat I sat in the living room eating toasted cheese washed down with a large crystal tumbler of Talisker and listening to Rod Stewart warbling The First Cut is the Deepest in grim tribute to a grim day. My trusty home stitches kit had been required to patch up the saw wounds and the effort had drained me. The Sith had been banished to their room like sulky teenagers and I tried again to call Ravi with no luck. Where the hell was he? He always had his mobile on him that much I knew.

I was going to have to abandon my flat for a while as doubtless Crowe knew where I lived. Even coming back now was very risky but I had shit I had to attend to not to mention take with me so I had no choice. The plan was to go to a different hotel every night to make it harder to track me. Crowe could find me if he really wanted but I was going to make it has hard for him as I possibly could. Magic, even the kind Crowe practised took time and sacrifice and I intended to take full advantage.

Turning the television on to the BBC 24 channel, I was treated to Edinburgh in flames, reminding me of the vision the Guardian had shown me on Arthur Seat.

The fire had not stopped at Gorgie.

There were now separate blazes starting, apparently spontaneously, and no one could figure out why. A map plotting their progress showed clearly that the city was indeed surrounded by its very own burning ring of fire.

My phone rang giving the first few bars of Snapper’s Dumping You displaying Ravi’s number. But it wasn’t Ravi on the other end…

The van came to an abrupt halt and I fell across the smaller wulver causing it yip, a high distressed sound. My face was now level with the Guardian’s faithful friend and its top lip wrinkled, a low snarling sound, so basso profundo that I felt it in my chest. I hurriedly pushed myself away from it, pressing for all I was worth into the farthest corner.

“What the hell happened?” I yelled. Ruby and Rufus jumped out the van, shouting something I didn’t catch. Carefully edging towards the door handle, I slowly pulled it down and got out into the cold night. It was snowing heavily as though the city was trying to put out the flames. We were on the winding road that led to the top of Arthur’s Seat and I could see the dull sodium glow of the fires that were razing the city to the ground. Of Ruby and Rufus there was no sign.

Then I heard it: a vast roar of rage that came from further up the road just at the sharp bend in the road. I ran towards it and then down a snow covered grass embankment in time to hear Ruby scream:

“Oh my God. Oh MY GOD!”

But at first I couldn’t see what the fuss was about because a battery of Corpse-candles rose and began buzzing around my head limiting my vision to a mauve coloured blur of light that had its own weight, like a coating of scum on the top of a pond. Whatever was out there would be getting a great heads up with my whereabouts all thanks to these little bastards. I remembered the old tales about them, that they lead unwary travellers to their deaths in peat bogs and over the edges of cliffs. They didn’t like the wind and driving snow judging by the way they parted slightly after a particularly vicious blast straight from the North Sea.

Ruby was sobbing, a hoarse, guttural sound of defeat and despair and still I could see nothing. But it didn’t matter because by then I felt the thrum of the life force flowing through the Park, Arthur’s Seat and the Crags. The Deadlights rose up and out in that familiar silver spill which could only mean one thing: something or someone was at the point of death. I was lost momentarily in the pull of all that elemental magic, a high that no amount of alcohol or drugs could match.

Or at least I was until a body was hurled from somewhere above, landing with a bone-shattering thud not ten feet from where I stood, ruining the mood.

The body was followed by an enormous mass I couldn’t make out. It took precious seconds before I could work out that both were locked in a fight to the death the ripping of skin audible even above the frenzied snarling and snapping. The second arrival was a creature of smoke and darkness swirling in upon itself and yet at the core, a scarlet light burned as though whatever it was had caught fire.

Standing for ages at the bus stop near the Minto Hotel desperate for a pee. Still no bloody bus. One had to come soon surely to God? She should have had Jerry pick her up but she’d been so involved with Joyce that she’d forgotten the time. By the time she’d spoken to Jerry, he was three beers in. She calls the taxi number again and then another. Engaged or no answer. She’ll try again in a minute. Another woman is already standing at the bus stop: small and slim with a tailored dog-tooth coat and high heels.

Not true but there is something about this woman with the fluting, fake laugh. A white mini pulls up at the curb next to them and the woman totters to the back seat which seems strange to Michelle. The driver rolls down the window.

“Happy to give you a lift darling.”

“No, really it’s not necessary,”

“I insist,” says the man, leaning over to open the passenger door in front. “Always happy to give a lady a free ride,” he continues, winking broadly.

“No,” she says with more force than she’d meant. “My husband’s coming-”

“Don’t know why he’s not here already darling. I wouldn’t let my wife out alone at this time of night. Not with the perverts that go about nowadays.”

“I’ve told you-”

“Okay, okay,” the man laughs, raising his hands in mock surrender. “It’s your funeral, isn’t it Steph?” Giggling from the back seat is the only response. Why on earth had she got in the back?

“Tell you what though, could you do us a favour and shut the door. It’s bloody Baltic.”

There’s no harm in helping him out, is there? She approaches the car, almost slips on the ice and snow slimed pavement and reaches out to shut the door. The woman for some reason has gotten back out the car and is now behind her. Maybe she’s dropped something and is going to retrieve it. Before she can reach out for the door, she’s pushed from behind and falls against the car, hitting her head on the side of the roof. Strong arms bundle her inside and the car screeches off.

I led the three vampires into the living room and ordered them to stand in front of a small table containing a crystal decanter foolish enough to have its top off.

“You must now bind yourselves to me by blood,” I told them. Another tip from Ravi although I don’t think he had expected me to be foolish enough to use it.

I motioned to them to come forward, extending my two index finger-blades. They hissed, features distorted to display a little of what lay beneath. I’d have to teach them the error of their ways and hope that I wasn’t turning into a ghoulish version of Henry Higgins in the process. If I was very unlucky they’d develop cod-cockney accents and the horror would be complete.

Sullenly they extended their wrists and I slashed each in turn, quick slicing motions that brought brackish blood smelling faintly of the sea welling up from pale skins. Like an old hand I caught it in the decanter before slashing my own wrist, taking care to do it horizontally. The wrist was probably not the best place but I only needed a few drops and the symbolism was worth it. The delicate patter as my blood joined theirs: a metallic tang, a brief spot of crimson in the darkness of the viscous fluid marked the most dangerous point of our brief acquaintance. Morgan’s cheeks visibly hollowed and Marjorie choked, drool running down her perfect chin onto her t-shirt.

They were, I realised, starving. For the first time I felt like the idiot in the tigers’ cage who had volunteered just to impress but now wished he hadn’t as they picked his limbs off like boys with flies’ wings. A brief hiatus, pregnant with the import of what I’d just done hung heavy in the room. To my knowledge no one had messed about with this particular little ménage a quatre and there was usually a good reason for that.

“To blood of thine add blood of mine, together ere we die. So mote it be,” I whispered. The spell was cast and, much like the act of flinging yourself under the wheels of a bus, there was no undoing it. No going back.

With their gaze boring into the back of my head I locked the decanter in a small cupboard by the window, noticing absently that snow was falling thick and fast obscuring the world as though some old god had wished it away. Even Fife, usually all too visible from this window, was a distant nightmare that I couldn’t see anymore. I needed to get going or I’d suffer the same fate. I threaded the key onto a chain and put it around my neck where it hung glistening dully in the meagre light. No sound disturbed the gravid silence apart from the tick-tock of the clock and the faint rumble of traffic muffled by the snow.

A marriage made in Hell, indeed. But who was going to wear the trousers?

The three vampires materialised out of the gloom luminous against the night sky gravid with snow.

“We found nothing mistress,” said Morgan in her best imitation of polite. I wasn’t fooled though, being able to see into her bloody little fantasies with me as head scream queen. Of the three she was adapting the fastest to simulating humanity. Was it so wrong to improve the already considerable skills of a ravening predator?

A milky, tainted light appeared from our left, coming from the city. But it wasn’t anything to do with the fire. A multitude of corpse-candles, will o’ the wisps, fizzed past my face and I involuntarily stepped back to avoid them. Their touch bewitched the mind into seeing what it wanted to see: loved ones long dead; treasure beyond counting; the list limited only by the imagination of the willing victim. I wasn’t ready to know the shape of my heart’s desire.

Not yet.

A chill wind blew my hair across a frozen face obliterating momentarily the piles of rubble and hulking machinery dotted around like a dinosaur’s graveyard. I was bone weary and sore from my assorted wounds. The playful scratch by Morgan throbbed and I suspected it was infected.

But I hadn’t been paying proper attention because the tainted light had not passed with the corpse candles. A low sepia cloud descended with the suddenness of a tsunami. It roiled in on itself briefly before covering the ground, enveloping everything in its path. I could see odd elongated shapes within it, like the distorted shadows of human beings thrown out by a fire. One shape raised a six fingered hand the fingers of which looked as though they had more joints than any mere human possessed.

Mistress…

The Sith were afraid. My beautiful bold carnivores were finally afraid. A thrill of satisfaction gave me the strength to go for the knives hanging at my belt. Whatever it was would have to pry these steel babies from my cold dead hands.

“Right here,” I said, pointing at a massive oak tree bowed down with snow like an old giant that had frozen to death. Between the dark and the driving storm, visibility was just down to a few feet and I’d almost missed the turn off.

“The house is about a mile down this road.”

“Christ Rose, give me some notice.”

“You try noticing anything from the back seat at night in a snow storm. See that light up there? That’s Vic and Michael’s place.”

“What, up that bastard hill? We’ll never get the car up there.”

He was right as it turned out, we couldn’t. The car kept sliding and eventually slid into a bank of soft snow from where it couldn’t be moved. Swearing, Rufus forced the car door open and had to do the same for mine. He stood with difficulty, snow encasing his legs up to mid-thigh and claiming the rest of him under a clotted blanket of ice crystals.

“Can’t you call your friends to come get us?” he shouted above the noise of the wind. “The weather’s too bad and I won’t be able to lug you all that way.”

“They weren’t in when I called. I’ll give it a another go,” I said, dialling.

“What?”

I suppressed a smile.

“You made me drive all this way to the middle of nowhere, for fu-”

“We’re just outside Perth,”I reminded him primly. “It’s hardly the middle of nowhere. Oh hi, Vic. It’s me. Everything sweet? Sorry to hear that. Listen, we’ve got a bit of a problem. We’re at the bottom of the hill, cars in a snow drift and I’m not in great shape. Can you come get us?”

“Well? Are they coming?”

“They said they’re busy and could we come back tomorrow. I’m kidding,” I said as he punched the roof of the car. “Listen be cool with Vic and Michael. Try not to piss them off.”

A dark shape materialised behind him, an arm closed around his throat pulling him backwards. He yelped something incomprehensible and then started choking as the arm was pulled tighter. A high laugh rang out and then something thumped the window beside me as a smeared bestial face pressed itself against the glass, nose flattened, teeth bared.

A heavy sleet was being vomited from above when I got out the taxi a couple of streets from Crowe’s house. I walked towards it, a Victorian stone villa set in grounds too big to be called a mere garden, ploughing my way through drifts of freshly fallen snow. The gate was open as though someone had recently passed through and not bothered to close it behind them. But I knew that it had been left that way by the Baobhan Sith as an ironic invitation to me, as though I was the vampire. I decided to accept and trod the path, unsullied by human footprints.

The front garden faced the main road but the back was secluded, protected as it was by a thickly planted line of mature trees, skeletal sentinels whose branches pierced a bruised sky. A blur of movement exploded to my right, brief but unmistakable. I hurried to the huge beech hedge where it had been, certain I’d find the perpetrator, but found nothing and no one.

Then, from a ground floor window the pale oval of a face appeared.

I retreated to the summerhouse and the face tracked my progress, or at least it did until something far more interesting caught its attention. I followed the trajectory of its gaze and there, as though appearing out of nowhere, were the three Baobhan Sith, naked and dancing sinuously in the snow to music only they could hear.

But I knew something the voyeur did not, that this was no cheap peep show, but the prelude to a far meatier entertainment. One of the Sith tossed an armful of blond hair over her right shoulder raising her breast in the process as though inviting the watcher behind glass to come play. In reality it was a signal to her blood sisters and I knew the real games were about to commence.

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Who am I?

Well that's a good question and on bad days I'm not sure I know the answer.

My name though is Rose Garnett and I hunt down among the dead men in Edinburgh's necropolis. These story fragments are jagged little pills from my own personal stash; free, gratis and for nothing. For those of a more delicate disposition, there's always the Dead Central Soundtrack to help the medicine go down.

And to the select few wise enough to know nothing is for free, these little peep holes will reveal what's really waiting on the other side. Who knows, if you're very unlucky it may even be me...